Carl Jung

The teaching

Taught from his own books, above all The Red Book, Psychological Types (1921), the Seven Sermons and Mysterium Coniunctionis.

Consciousness and the personal unconscious

The psyche, Jung teaches, is far larger than the part we know. At the centre of the field of awareness stands the ego, the sense of being oneself, but most of what moves us lies outside it. Below the threshold is the personal unconscious: all that has been forgotten, pushed away because it was painful, or felt too faintly ever to reach awareness.

Its contents gather in complexes, knots of memory, image and feeling around a core of strong emotion, which behave like small persons within the person. He first found them by experiment. A list of words is read out, and the subject answers each with the first word that comes; where an answer is slow, odd, repeated or forgotten afterwards, a complex has been touched. A complex is a wound and also a store of energy, and the work is to know one's complexes rather than be ruled by them.

The collective unconscious and the archetypes

Beneath the personal layer lies one that no single life has made. Jung calls it the collective unconscious: the same in all people, inherited as the instincts are, and showing itself in the same images in myths, religions, visions and dreams the world over. Its forms are the archetypes.

An archetype in itself has no content. It is a readiness to produce a certain kind of image and feeling, which he likens to the axial system of a crystal, which shapes the crystal as it forms in the solution yet has no material existence of its own. What one meets in a dream is never the archetype itself but an archetypal image, clothed in the stuff of one life and one age. How these figures appear in dreams, the persona and the shadow, the anima and animus, the wise old man and the Self, is taught on the dreams art's branch Jung's way.

Two attitudes and four functions

People differ in the way their energy flows. In the extravert it flows outward, toward people and things; in the introvert it flows back toward the subject, and the inner response to the world is what counts. Neither is better, and each sees what the other misses.

Across the two attitudes run four functions. Sensation tells that something is there, thinking what it is, feeling what it is worth, and intuition where it comes from and where it is going. Thinking and feeling judge, and he calls them rational; sensation and intuition simply perceive, and he calls them irrational. In each person one function leads, a second helps it, and the one opposite the leader lags behind in the unconscious: feeling for a thinker, intuition for a sensation type. This inferior function is slow and touchy, and the unconscious breaks in through it; it is also the door to growth, for the work of later life is to bring it up. The types are tendencies, never boxes.

The opposites and the third

Psychic life runs between opposites, and its energy comes from their tension, as a current flows between two poles. Jung borrows from Heraclitus the word enantiodromia for the law that any extreme, held long enough, turns into its opposite, so that a one-sided life invites its own reversal.

When a conflict cannot be solved by choosing a side, he teaches holding it: giving both sides their say, consciously, letting neither win, and bearing the tension. Then the unconscious often produces a third thing, a symbol that is neither side and both, which carries the person to a new attitude. He calls this the transcendent function, and holds that real change comes this way and not by the victory of one side over the other.

Active imagination

The Red Book is the record of his own descent. He let himself drop, on purpose, into the images that rose in him, and met the figures he found there as one meets people: an old prophet, Elijah, with a blind girl, Salome, and later Philemon, an old man with the horns of a bull and the wings of a kingfisher. Philemon taught him that thoughts are not made by the ego; they arise in the psyche as animals live in a forest or people in a room, with lives of their own.

His method was to write down every word and paint every image, to answer the figures as he would a living person, and then to carry what he had learned into his life. To understand the images is not enough, he warns: insight must become an ethical obligation, or the images take power over the one who sees them. What kept him on the ground, he said, was his family and his work. The stages of the method and its cautions are taught on the divination art's branch Reading as a mirror; for a person in a fragile state the images can overwhelm.

The Seven Sermons to the Dead

The Seven Sermons give the cosmology of those years in the voice of Basilides. The dead come back from Jerusalem, where they did not find what they sought, and ask to be taught. The teaching begins with the Pleroma, which is nothing and fullness at once. In it every opposite stands balanced against its partner and cancels it, full and empty, living and dead, good and evil; it has no qualities, and so it is idle to think about it. We are the Pleroma, for it is in everything, yet we are distinct from it as created things, whose very nature is distinctiveness.

From this comes the first rule of a life. The creature is itself only by striving for its own distinctiveness, the principle of individuation; to sink back into sameness is to dissolve into the Pleroma. Above the God and the devil whom people worship stands Abraxas, the god of activity and the union of all opposites, who begets truth and lies, good and evil, light and darkness in one deed.

The last sermon turns inward. Man is a gateway through which one passes from the outer world of gods, daemons and souls into the inner world. At an immeasurable distance shines a single star, the god of this one man, his own world, toward which the soul travels after death, and to it he is to pray. Then the dead fall silent and rise like smoke.

Letting things happen

In his commentary on The Secret of the Golden Flower he names the attitude the whole work needs. The Western mind, trained to do, has to learn to let things happen: the action through non-action of the Chinese text, the letting go of oneself that Meister Eckhart taught. Consciousness loosens its grip on the objects it clings to, watches what rises without judging it or hurrying it toward use, and so gives the unconscious room to speak. He warns against borrowing Eastern methods as a garment; the same attitude has to be found in one's own ground, with one's own images.

The mandala

In the years after the war he drew a small circular drawing in a notebook each morning, and found that it answered his inner state that day: when he was disturbed, the circle lost its balance. Slowly he understood the mandala as a picture of the self, the wholeness of the personality, which is harmonious when all goes well. He found the same circles drawn by patients who had never seen an Eastern image, at moments when the psyche was reordering itself, and read them as its own attempt to heal a division by setting a centre.

The union of opposites

His last work on alchemy follows the marriage of king and queen, sun and moon, through the old books, and reads it as the end of the work of becoming whole. He takes from Gerhard Dorn a union in three stages. In the first, spirit and soul are joined and drawn back from the body's pull: self-knowledge, the mind seeing its passions without being driven by them. In the second, spirit and soul thus joined are reunited with the body, so that what was understood is lived. In the third, the whole person is united with the unus mundus, the one world beneath psyche and matter alike.

The inner reading of the alchemical work is taught on the alchemy art's branch Two alchemies, and the one world as the ground of meaningful coincidence on the physics art's branch Synchronicity. What runs through all of his teaching is the claim that the psyche has a goal of its own, the whole person, and that the images of the old arts are its own record of the road there.